wn imagination, Rita. But" he hesitated--"you will have to
consider your position, dear, now that you are the future Mrs. Monte."
Rita felt her cheeks flush, and she did not reply immediately.

"I don't understand you, Lucy," she declared at last. "How odd you are."

"Am I? Well, never mind. We will talk about my eccentricity later. Here
is Cyrus."

Kilfane was standing in the entrance to the stage door of the theatre at
which he was playing. As the car drew up he lifted two leather grips on
to the step, and Mareno, descending, took charge of them.

"Come along, Mollie," said Kilfane, looking back.

Miss Gretna, very excited, ran out and got into the car beside Rita.
Pyne lowered two of the collapsible seats for Kilfane and himself, and
the party set out for Limehouse.

"Oh!" cried the fair-haired Mollie, grasping Rita's hand, "my heart
began palpitating with excitement the moment I woke up this morning! How
calm you are, dear."

"I am only calm outside," laughed Rita.

The joie de vivre and apparently unimpaired vitality, of this woman, for
whom (if half that which rumor whispered were true) vice had no secrets,
astonished Rita. Her physical resources were unusual, no doubt, because
the demand made upon them by her mental activities was slight.

As the car sped along the Strand, where theatre-goers might still be
seen making for tube, omnibus, and tramcar, and entered Fleet Street,
where the car and taxicab traffic was less, a mutual silence fell upon
the party. Two at least of the travellers were watching the lighted
windows of the great newspaper offices with a vague sense of foreboding,
and thinking how, bound upon a secret purpose, they were passing along
the avenue of publicity. It is well that man lacks prescience. Neither
Rita nor Sir Lucien could divine that a day was shortly to come when the
hidden presses which throbbed about them that night should be busy with
the story of the murder of one and disappearance of the other.

Around St. Paul's Churchyard whirled the car, its engine running
strongly and almost noiselessly. The great bell of St. Paul's boomed out
the half-hour.

"Oh!" cried Mollie Gretna, "how that made me jump! What a beautifully
gloomy sound!"

Kilfane murmured some inaudible reply, but neither Pyne nor Rita spoke.

Cornhill and Leadenhall Street, along which presently their route lay,
offered a prospect of lamp-lighted emptiness, but at Aldgate they found
themselves amid East En